Today, a collection of posts I’ve not read in detail, or do not have time to comment upon in detail, but wish to save for future reference.
Science on Religon: Connor Wood: Reason™ is not going to save the world
Alternet: Valerie Tarico: Why Atheists Are as Moral as Any Religious Group: An interview with a sociologist of religion and non-belief
And here are a couple useful links about science fiction.
PDF Teacher’s Guide for The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction
io9: Look At How Science Fiction Maps Out Our Future World: someone’s timeline about numerous SF novels and stories mapped out along a future timeline. At first glance, it seems an odd mix of significiant, and insignificant, works. (Ben Elton? And who are these “Gregory D. Bear” and “Kim S. Robinson”?)
This sounds good to me, at The Onion: God Announces Plans To Slowly Wean Humans Off Religion:
Saying that the various belief systems had a “good run” over the last few millennia but that it was probably time for humans to get by on their own, the Lord Our God, He Who Is Seen And Unseen, proclaimed Monday that He would begin slowly weaning humanity off religion.
And Jeffrey Tayler’s latest Sunday Salon essay says things more and more of us believe, and have been reluctant to say so: These religious clowns should scare you: GOP candidates’ gullible, lunatic faith is a massive character flaw.
For example: If I went to a dentist and she diagnosed my periodontal disease and her advice for the cure was “to pray”… I would find another dentist. Remarkably, large segments of the American population seem willing to accept similar advice from the various conservative/Republican politicians about much more major issues. (Rick Perry, Bobby Jindal, et al.)
Tayler:
The advances of science have rendered all vestigial belief in the supernatural more than just obsolete. They have shown it to indicate grave character flaws (among them, gullibility, a penchant for wish-thinking and an inability to process information), or, at the very least, an intellectual recklessness we should eschew, especially in men and women being vetted for public office. One who will believe outlandish propositions about reality on the basis of no evidence will believe anything, and is, simply put, not to be trusted.
